Sunday, May 22, 2016

BARCELONA - #807

I can’t imagine a more withering critique from a Whit
Stillman character than Fred, the caustic American patriot in Stillman’s 1994
film Barcelona, realizing that the Spanish partygoers he’s
with won’t dance because they consider it too early in the evening. To combat
this ridiculous revelation, Fred puts on a limbo record and sets up a pool cue
to serve as the stick everyone is intended to shimmy beneath. To say it doesn’t
go down well would be an understatement.

Stillman’s second film in many ways could be seen as a
sequel to his first, Metropolitan [review], even though they
don’t quite share any of the same characters. The three movies in Criterion’s
A Whit Stillman Trilogy are a thematic series, exploring
different pockets of life in the 1980s. Barcelona, which is
the middle film in terms of release but more likely the third in terms of the
narrative timeline, breaks the tradition set by the others by not just taking
place in Spain, but the American transplants who are visiting there, Fred
(Chris Eigeman) and Ted (Taylor Nichols), are from Chicago rather than New
York. Not that it matters in Stillman’s world. Absent of accent or dialect, the
cousins are two pieces of the same upper crust that Stillman bakes for all his
movies.

The movie begins with Navy man Fred arriving at Ted’s
Barcelona flat on an advance mission to prepare the way for the arrival of his
fleet. Set near the end of the Cold War, the visitors must face political
unrest and anti-American sentiment. Ted is a salesman who has been living and
working in Barcelona for a few years. He is acclimated to the scene, running in
an international circle that mostly deals with foreign business, hanging out
with women who present at trade shows (never was quite sure what that meant).
Recently heartbroken, Ted is trying to live a religious-fueled life, theorizing
that much of the failure of love in Western civilization is down to our
obsession with physical beauty.

As a pair, Ted and Fred could easily be Jack and Nick from
Metropolitan, with Nichols once again playing the neurotic
thinker and Eigeman his sarcastic foil. Fred takes his job seriously, but
little else, and quickly skewers his cousin’s philosophy while simultaneously sapping
some of the vanilla out of Ted’s game by telling the ladies Ted is an S&M
daddy with a leather fetish. Ted’s own commitment to his beliefs is ruined
shortly thereafter, when the so-called homely girl stands him up and sends her
pretty friend Montserrat (Tuska Bergen) in her stead. Ted falls for her, and
gets serious fast--though their dating is complicated by the fact that
Montserrat is in an open relationship with a reporter (Pep Munné) who not only
is obsessed with beauty, but also American vulgarity and conspiracy theories.
He believes Fred is a C.I.A. agent.

Barcelona is light on plot, but as you
can tell, heavy on story. The episodic script follows the cousins over a month
or so, focusing on their social life and their mishaps as strangers in a
strange land. Unlike Metropolitan, which tracks one outsider
infiltrating a small group, the leads here are outsiders in a much larger
venue, with no real potential to fully assimilate. Amusingly, Stillman
juxtaposes Fred’s boorish behavior with the bruised sensitivity of proud
Americans who just can’t understand why everyone doesn’t think their cool. The
way the two men get along with their Spanish lovers and their friends is the
source of Barcelona’s humor and drama in equal measure. The
separation is even evident in acting styles. The American’s are far more
caricatured, the Spaniards more natural. (Including a pre-Mighty Aphrodite Mira Sorvino, wholly immersed in her role as a Barcelona
girl who strikes Fred’s fancy.)

More important that the cultural divide, though, is the
relationship between the cousins, which has vacillated between love and hate
since they were kids. Ted can’t handle Fred’s humor, and believes him to take
advantage, regularly borrowing without asking permission or returning what he
took. Yet, they are also the only family they have and will stick with each
other when it counts. Their realization of this--and where the two boys playing
around overseas have to finally try to be adults--comes after a few
misconceptions about Fred’s real identity leads to him being shot. Honestly,
Barcelona suffers after this story turn and never really
finds its balance. While the first 2/3 of the movie is fairly footloose and
fancy free, the final third tries for a gravitas it never quite lands, complete
with a pat coda that comes off as wholly unnecessary. Like the indie director
was trying to placate his new corporate bosses.

Still, that first hour or so is what will draw you back to
repeat viewings. In my write-up of Metropolitan, I compared
Stillman’s creation of a self-contained world to that of Woody Allen’s, but I
think with Barcelona there are more comparisons to be made
between the two auteurs. Beginning with the simple credits (lettering on a
black field, traditional music) and carrying through the light filmmaking
approach--there are no zooms, and only the subtlest of camera movement--one
can’t help but think of some of Allen’s more recent European-set movies,
including Vicky Cristina Barcelona [review]. Ted and Fred
could be the usual Allen stand-in cleaved in two--though, one would never
mistake the writing for Woody. Stillman’s comic tone is far more droll.

Also like those recent Allen films,
Barcelona seems more like a lark rather than one of Stillman’s more considered efforts. Which isn’t to suggest he didn’t take it
seriously, but more that he maybe let the process take him where it would
rather than bearing down on a greater meaning or story. It’s a carefree vacation
abroad, with the extraneous philosophizing being merely a pretense. That stuff
is the jazz that Fred so abhors, and we’re all really here to limbo.

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About Me

Author of prose novels and comic books like Cut My Hair, It Girl & the Atomics, You Have Killed Me, and 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. Jamie's most recent novel is the serialized book Bobby Pins and Mary Janes, and his most recent graphic novels are the sci-fi romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Madame Frankenstein with Megan Levens; and the weird crime comic Archer Coe & the Thousand Natural Shocks with Dan Christensen. He also co-created Lady Killer with Joëlle Jones.